Abstract in another language

Based on the conception of Friedrich August von Hayek, this study set out to examine the spontaneous order of competition as a fragile system, using the methodical approach of systems theory. Following the postulates of methodological individualism, self-organisation and competition as the organisational principle of Hayek’s spontaneous order, an adequate term of emergence is accurately defined as well as a precise definition of the system boundary. The emergent order of the market on the one hand and society on the other hand are considered as two different phenomena. Focussing on the economic core-problem of scarcity and the relevance of knowledge, the role of the individuals is reconsidered. Based on a critically reflected frame of conceptions from systems theory, the properties Hayek postulated in his conception of spontaneous order are redefined in a hybrid model of clearly defined and corresponding terms. This provides a fine-grained basis for increasingly abstract differentiations and important restrictions to cover the problem of the system’s fragility. By means of this methodological setting, the core aspects of systems theory, i.e. complexity, differentiation, problem solving, organisation, structure, self-reference and homeostasis are elaborated. The study shows that the operational closeness of the market system and its simultaneous orientation towards individual utility steers spontaneous order into fragile states. Within the system there exists a tendency to percept competition as complexity. This causes processes of internal differentiation. This means that from the perspective of systems theory, the spontaneous order of competition resp. the market system has no option to stabilize its own working principle. Moreover, competition itself, viewed from the paradigm of organisation und structure, seems to be a structural problem. In this perspective, the system’s fragility reproduces itself. From the perspective of the system’s environment, the solution of the market system causes new problems. Insofar the operational closed market system produces scarcity, it is simultaneously disable to perceive critical states of its environment and disable to solve these as problems by means of its own capacities. From this point of view, the existence of a market system seems to be rather a highly fragile kind of emergent coherence than an evolutionary superior phenomenon.